Best Texas Cities For New Year’s Eve

The new year will be here before we know it, and the folks at WalletHub have put together a list of the Top 100 places in the United States to ring in 2018. You can read the full list here. We all know that the premiere spot in the country is Times Square New York City. But, quite a few Texas cities made the list this year!

Here is the rundown of cities throughout the Lone Star state that made the list. Note that New York is listed just as a reference and I have also included a couple nearby non-Texas cities as well:

#1 New York, NY (77.23)

#12 Dallas, TX (66.18)

#15 Austin, TX (65.24)

#18 San Antonio (64.06)

#23 Houston, TX (61.13)

#36 El Paso, TX (57.07)

#50 Colorado Springs, CO (52.90)

#55 Tulsa, OK (52.35)

#57 Albuquerque, NM (52.02)

#61 Oklahoma City, OK (51.33)

#69 Fort Worth, TX (49.70)

#73 Laredo, TX (48.66)

#76 Plano, TX (48.43)

#79 Arlington, TX (47.79)

#88 Corpus Christi, TX (44.53)

#93 Garland, TX (42.55)

#95 Lubbock, TX (42.10)

#96 Irving, TX (42.06)

So what do the scores next to each name mean and how did WalletHub come up with that score?

In order to determine the best spots for celebrating New Year’s Eve, WalletHub compared the 100 most populated U.S. cities across three key dimensions: 1) Entertainment & Food, 2) Costs and 3) Safety & Accessibility.

We evaluated those dimensions using 25 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for New Year’s Eve partiers. For metrics marked with an asterisk (*), we used the square root of the population to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for minor differences across cities.

Finally, we determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its total score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample. In determining our sample, we considered only the city proper in each case, excluding cities in the surrounding metro area.

Availability of Luxury Shopping & Gourmet Food: Full Weight (~3.57 Points)
Note: This metric measures the number of jewelry shops per capita* and the number of gourmet specialty-food stores per capita*.